so recently, my buddy and i took it upon ourselves to do a head gasket in his 2004 s40 with the turbo 2.5. we "finished" a few days ago just enough to see if it would run. before i get crucified, please let me explain. we simply wanted to make sure it would run again after reassembly. that being said, it doesn't have an exhaust manifold gasket, it has 3 missing bolts in the manifold, and we replaced every clamp with generic hose clamps. when we took the valve "cover" off, i used some generic rtv on the outside surface, and none on the inner surface because the original gasket material was in okay shape and never had issues. fast forward to it with the head and valve cover on and it has a massive oil leak coming from the top of the engine near the timing belt. it's impossible to tell exactly where its coming from because it pools very slowly and gets thrown everywhere by the cams. i've heard a lot of people say it's the oil cap seal, but the oil cap and piece that mounts to the cover is dry. most of the oil is on that side though. all of the bolts are properly torqued and tight, too. we're going to do the pcv test with a glove tomorrow to see if that might help. also, the #1 cylinder spark plug well was dry, as were the rest of them. when i took the O ring thing out oil leaked in thought, but i know for a fact it isn't coming from the wells. any ideas?

Oil can be seen on the cover, this was after about a minute of running

 

I'd look at the VVT gear and its actuator. VVT is driven by oil pressure so a failed part can push oil onto the timing belt and top of the engine.

 

RTV is a bad thing, it will clog oil passages and is not designed to seal those machined surfaces - you need the correct anerobic sealer. Use a small roller to spread the sealer, after all the old is cleaned off. (like a tiny paint roller)

But with that much oil that quickly - Did you take the cam gears off? Did you use new cam seals? Were the Oring seals in the cam gears damaged somehow? You did a "head gasket", WHY? Did the car overheat? If so was the head straightened? (Overheating warps the head, gasket "blows", surfacing the head does not fix where the top of the head is warped also - with the cams getting bent as they spin.)

 

it wasn't overheating, but was going through coolant fast

 

Lotta questions - not a lotta answers there. ;-)

 

Yep - (head gaskets don't "leak" coolant - unless damaged from overheating!)

 

as far as replacing stuff, we haven't touched anything. all the seals are the same still and i didn't take the cams out, so everything is the same still. the only things we touched were mentioned in my original post

 

That was a whole lot of work to do - on a guess that the head gasket was the problem

Sorry for your troubles,

 

in our case it was, it doesn't burn coolant anymore. the only issue now is the oil leak

 

the thing that's puzzling me is just where could it be from? could it be the hose clamp on the pcv instead of an oetiker clamp? and i don't exactly think it's a cam seal because it seems to pool on the top and then leak onto the belt

 

VVT is driven by oil pressure so a failed part can push oil onto the timing belt and top of the engine.
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